boss trombone: I don't like your essay
boss trombone: fuck you
boss trombone: your shit is supposed to together
boss trombone: now I feel lost
boss trombone: you were my role model
RabidKangaroo15: Question everything, always
RabidKangaroo15: Is what you take out of that
RabidKangaroo15: It could be summarized with the sentence "I need to read more instead of wasting my damn time with bullshit"
RabidKangaroo15: Which after feeling the need to write that, I did
RabidKangaroo15: 200 pages read of Food of the Gods in four days
RabidKangaroo15: Along with a trip to Borders for when I'm done with that
RabidKangaroo15: I made it my new hobby by force
boss trombone: Why?
boss trombone: I don't get your motivations
RabidKangaroo15: Because I figure it's more important than the average recreational activity
RabidKangaroo15: Especially given my choice to engage in the drug culture
RabidKangaroo15: I should understand its roots
RabidKangaroo15: As well as intended purpose
RabidKangaroo15: Beyond the "You should do this acid, it will be cool"
RabidKangaroo15: Followed by the most unpleasant experience humanly possible
boss trombone: Who defines a drug's purpose?
RabidKangaroo15: Ancient tribes that did it for thousands of years and perfected the art of shamnism and symbiotic natural relationship
RabidKangaroo15: Not to say that it doesn't withstand analysis from anyone else
RabidKangaroo15: But I think it is of extreme importance if you're going to take the drug to know what it's used for
RabidKangaroo15: Which in essence is a sort of
RabidKangaroo15: mental medicine
boss trombone: How do you still enjoy stuff like video games when you realize it's pointless bullshit, and you want to connect with nature
boss trombone: I find it impossible for someone to live a spiritual life or something
boss trombone: and still be with society
RabidKangaroo15: Which can be aided as normal
RabidKangaroo15: By not taking society seriously
RabidKangaroo15: I exist within its framework by happenstance, not any rel choice
boss trombone: You just said you want to apply to a good college and get a better life or whatever
boss trombone: in your essay
RabidKangaroo15: The pursuit of knowledge takes many forms
RabidKangaroo15: What I really seek is not really the total destruction of the dominator society
RabidKangaroo15: But more a transformation
RabidKangaroo15: Which in some ways is happening in terms of the whole Green Movement
RabidKangaroo15: Not to any significant degree in terms of social norms, but at least people seem to be coming to terms with the fact that we're completely destroying the planet
boss trombone: RabidKangaroo15: The pursuit of knowledge takes many forms
boss trombone: ?
boss trombone: Knowledge for what?
boss trombone: How is that important if you want to live a spirtual life
RabidKangaroo15: The two are separate issues
RabidKangaroo15: But they in no way prevent one another
RabidKangaroo15: The main point is
RabidKangaroo15: Things like video games happen to be repetitive, though they're fun to a degree
RabidKangaroo15: You don't really gain anything from them, but when spare time allows it's not something to scorn completely
RabidKangaroo15: It's just that a life of nothing but that
RabidKangaroo15: And no learning of anything
RabidKangaroo15: Seems sort of sedentary
boss trombone: If you're not making an impact with what you learned then what's the point?
boss trombone: If being happy is just chemicals in your brain
boss trombone: then why even bother
RabidKangaroo15: The important drugs aren't about being happy
RabidKangaroo15: Euphoria is not the point of mushrooms or acid or DMT
RabidKangaroo15: Aldous Huxley defined the brain as an instrument to narrow reality into recognizable structures
RabidKangaroo15: The main point of psychedelics is to deny the brain its intended function
RabidKangaroo15: And to experience the world in its true essence without any of the mental protection barriers
RabidKangaroo15: The raw experience of data is not necessarily pleasant
RabidKangaroo15: As for learning being pointless
RabidKangaroo15: For one thing self-improvement doesn't have much of a connection to other people
RabidKangaroo15: Thus changing things
RabidKangaroo15: Though you can't teach anyone the errors of their ways if you don't know what's right
RabidKangaroo15: So even though changing the world isn't necessarily the primary goal of education for me, it doesn't hurt the cause either
RabidKangaroo15: There's no downside to making yourself smart
RabidKangaroo15: Remaining ignorant is another matter
boss trombone: I don't really like this
boss trombone: ignorance is way better
RabidKangaroo15: How so
boss trombone: Well
boss trombone: I could have fun with out worrying about things having a point
RabidKangaroo15: Fun is trivial
RabidKangaroo15: It has no weight behind it
RabidKangaroo15: Eat lead paint chips if you want to be ignorant of the world around you, but there are better things to eat if you want some sort of understanding
RabidKangaroo15: Fun doesn't extend any further than immediate self-gratification
boss trombone: You're not aware of that if you're ignorant
boss trombone: I'm kealous of people that get happy when they land a new job or have a baby and they are so happy about it
boss trombone: I'm never going to have that
boss trombone: j
boss trombone: the feeling they do
RabidKangaroo15: The feeling of elation from landing a new job tends to be transient anyway and usually dissolves once they actually start it
RabidKangaroo15: Unless you can find a job that's actually worthwhile
RabidKangaroo15: Which is statistically unlikely
boss trombone: I mean
boss trombone: Even if you get a job where you make $50 an hour
boss trombone: Money doesn'tm atter to me anymore
boss trombone: I don't want a job
RabidKangaroo15: Job is just a matter of survival
RabidKangaroo15: Thus the pay is somewhat insignificant
RabidKangaroo15: All you really need is enough to meet the conditions of basic survival, but it's the nature of the job that matters
RabidKangaroo15: Say I offer you a job to sit on an assembly line and screw bolts into their assigned slots for $70/hr
RabidKangaroo15: Or I give you a job doing something you find interesting and conductive to self-improvement, but pay you $35/hr
RabidKangaroo15: Which do you go for?
boss trombone: interesting of course..
boss trombone: who owuldn't.
boss trombone: would
RabidKangaroo15: Exactly
RabidKangaroo15: It's not a money game
RabidKangaroo15: It usually just happens to be that people don't have that choice
RabidKangaroo15: And that's largely a cultural thing if you look at it
RabidKangaroo15: Chomsky has referred to it as "wage slavery"
RabidKangaroo15: By any objective standards you're owned by whoever runs your company
RabidKangaroo15: To them you're nothing more than a tool used to increase their wealth
RabidKangaroo15: Terrence McKenna in the book I'm reading always refers to it as the "dominator culture" which is the perfect term for it
RabidKangaroo15: And the most pathetic thing about it is that nobody actually wins
RabidKangaroo15: It's just a stupid game of numbers and trivial bullshit
RabidKangaroo15: The goal is to make a billion dollars and to buy a bunch of crap you neither want nor need just for the sake of an ego boost
RabidKangaroo15: He argues that it's this persistent ego of the patriarchal society that's the cause of just about every problem today
RabidKangaroo15: Not to say that he's somehow some militant feminist
RabidKangaroo15: But any true notion of a partnership has been lost for thousands of years
boss trombone: Exactly, so how can you live a happy life knowing that the point of anything you do (school to get a better job, etc) is to get more money.
RabidKangaroo15: Because that's not the point of it
RabidKangaroo15: I don't give a shit how much money I earn in life
RabidKangaroo15: That is not the goal, the goal is sort of a community effort
RabidKangaroo15: One reason I feel the need to be knowledgeable about things is so that I can pass that on
RabidKangaroo15: The dominator society arises from a sort of bestial nature
RabidKangaroo15: In an analytic light, the ideas of diplomacy and leadership that we show in Western civilization are so barbaric that it's almost laughable
RabidKangaroo15: And historically it seems like this has always been the case because we never bother to look back far enough
RabidKangaroo15: To most people civilization started with Rome and before that there's just a big blank period
RabidKangaroo15: There were living conditions thousands of years before that that were far more desirable than anything we have now
RabidKangaroo15: Where people lived in tribes in harmony, with a strong sense of community and partnership, as well as a deep connection with nature
RabidKangaroo15: Something reminiscent of the descriptions of Eden, in some way
RabidKangaroo15: Only without the pestilence of a God that abhors the quest for learning and becomes enraged at Adam and Eve eating from the tree of knowledge
RabidKangaroo15: We still look at that as a sin, strangely enough
RabidKangaroo15: Seven thousand years or so ago the religion, if you could call it that, didn't extend much further than the idea of a male-femal partnership as forming a whole, as well as the worship of the mother goddess
RabidKangaroo15: Now we have a religion that degrades women in just about every way and trivializes their role
RabidKangaroo15: A God that has no sense of femininity
RabidKangaroo15: He has no mother, no sister, no daughter
RabidKangaroo15: And anyone who would claim the importance of women in society is either a faggot or a woman
RabidKangaroo15: And something to be looked down on
RabidKangaroo15: Because apparently men are all that matter
RabidKangaroo15: As for his argument of the importance of drugs in influencing this behavior,
RabidKangaroo15: Things like mushrooms shatter conceptions such as this
RabidKangaroo15: They serve to deconstruct the entire world view and build it over from scratch with new inherent natural truths
RabidKangaroo15: The reason they have no place in our society, and the reason they've even been outlawed, is because they challenge the very fabric of our being withing the Western patriarchal society
RabidKangaroo15: Marijuana causes a lack of competition and less desire to give importance to "manliness"
RabidKangaroo15: Mushrooms shatter things even farther
RabidKangaroo15: And something like DMT goes so far as to remove you from this world entirely and let you experience the truest nature of the universe without filters or interruption from the percieved normal world
RabidKangaroo15: So it is in this manner that defiance of the social structure is in fact a necessity
RabidKangaroo15: The reason the two story house, six figure job, fast car model of life seems meaningless, and the reason it seems so hard to find significant is because there's no real way to do so
RabidKangaroo15: It falls in absolute defiance of any human nature
RabidKangaroo15: And serves only to perpetuate that which is wrong by any standard of decency, and from a political role is little more than a way of farming the next generation of workers to create a utopian landscape for the masters of society
RabidKangaroo15: Not that that's any better for them either
RabidKangaroo15: It's just the same thing we get with more gizmos and less effort
RabidKangaroo15: But their supposed intelligence extends no further than business models and an unwavering feeling that they're the most important god damn person in the world and it's their right to control it
RabidKangaroo15: So I reject it almost entirely
RabidKangaroo15: The society has produced a few good things, but they fall outside the purpose of the structure as well
RabidKangaroo15: Nintendo is hardly to be looked at as the enemy
RabidKangaroo15: They're just trying to make things a bit more enjoyable, and the lack of significance in video games can't be looked at as a source of malicec
RabidKangaroo15: malice
RabidKangaroo15: Anyway, this is just my view
RabidKangaroo15: There are good parts of society and bad parts
RabidKangaroo15: Unfortunately, it happens to be the self-obsessed type of megalomaniac that ends up running things
boss trombone: RabidKangaroo15: The reason the two story house, six figure job, fast car model of life seems meaningless, and the reason it seems so hard to find significant is because there's no real way to do so
boss trombone: Right, which is why I'm finding it hard to have a purpose in living, since i'm going to be making video games
boss trombone: this isn;'t helping society
boss trombone: this is making money
boss trombone: then dying
RabidKangaroo15: Well that's because unless you feel like dying right now, it's kind of necessary that you indulge the framework of society at least on a basic level
RabidKangaroo15: It's certainly unfortunate and there are systems of living that are better, but they don't happen to be the ones around anymore
RabidKangaroo15: So I go to work, but I don't give it any sort of respect, nor do I take it seriously
RabidKangaroo15: It's something I have to do
RabidKangaroo15: But given that you have to do it
RabidKangaroo15: You might as well get a job that plays off what you would be doing in the ideal world anyway
RabidKangaroo15: Say we're all a big happy worldwide family
RabidKangaroo15: People care about eachother, we all feel reasonably fulfilled and there's no oppressive power structure in place
RabidKangaroo15: Would you still have any opposition to making video games?
RabidKangaroo15: There's nothing wrong with that
RabidKangaroo15: I would likely be a writer or whatever its equivalent would be
RabidKangaroo15: If I was born a thousand years ago I would probably be making the cave paintings and attempting to further the worldview of the local tribes by writing
RabidKangaroo15: I apply this to the modern day as much as I can
RabidKangaroo15: The prospect of money is just a sort of side-effect of this because it happens to be the way we run things
RabidKangaroo15: It's little more than a meaningless number
boss trombone: I want to make games to make kids happy like I was and felt important when I beat games like orcarina. But then I feel sad that I'm not going to experience that again, or that any of this matters since when you're dead you're dead, and even if some sort of after life existed, it wouldn't matter
boss trombone: bah
boss trombone: anything you say just kinda
boss trombone: points out the obvious
boss trombone: I like what bh says
boss trombone: a spec
boss trombone: I want a divine meaning
RabidKangaroo15: Well keep in mind that our view of reality is exceedingly narrow
RabidKangaroo15: "Divine meaning" is an interesting way of describing it, but there is a profound truth to be found by dissolving the barriers of perception
RabidKangaroo15: By not allowing the brain to funcion as designed, a sort of cosmic truth emerges from it that is too strange and awe-inspiring to be described
RabidKangaroo15: Para-lingual, you could call it
RabidKangaroo15: As such, trying to explain it doesn't work
RabidKangaroo15: I could try, but it wouldn't result in anything
RabidKangaroo15: Or at least not anything at all useful
boss trombone: I don't see any more walls I could knowck down in my brain
boss trombone: I don't see what drugs are going to aid with
boss trombone: I feel on the same page as you
RabidKangaroo15: The wall of reality itself
RabidKangaroo15: Think of it this way:
RabidKangaroo15: Physically speaking, the universe is a mishmash of particles and waves
RabidKangaroo15: We interpret these as sound, light, but that's just our interpretation
RabidKangaroo15: All we have is sensory experience
RabidKangaroo15: When you break down the very wall of sensory experience, undescribable things start to happen
RabidKangaroo15: Which isn't a helpful description
RabidKangaroo15: But
RabidKangaroo15: It gives some basic concept of the unknown
boss trombone: Are you afraid of death?
RabidKangaroo15: Not particularly
RabidKangaroo15: Also brb
boss trombone: Don't you get sad in day to day life with igrnoant peers and family?
boss trombone: Don't you feel bad that they don't have the konwing you do?
boss trombone: WHERE ARE YOU
boss trombone: fuck I'm tired
boss trombone: plz respond to my questions in my aaway message and sign on tomorrow or soething

AND/OR, respond to it here. My peers are not ignorant nor is my family for the most part. Given the presence of misinformation I will do my best to correct it, hence the additional need of book knowledge to be able to do away with nonsense and thus improve the world in some small way. Perhaps large way if I ever write a book with a decent message to it. Either way, I try.

At this point in time it becomes apparent that a major decision needs to be made, the result of which will likely carry over to the rest of my natural life. Prior to this moment I have hid behind a sort of passive intellectualism and false claims of expertise in various fields. My free time has been spent instead on pointless and repetitive recreational activities such as video games and TV. Though I engage freely in the usage of various hallucinogenic drugs and have an above-average understanding of the complexities that go with such a lifestyle, I have done so up to this point with knowledge that is, by any honest appraisal, grossly insufficient. Spending a few minutes a day reading Erowid is no passable substitute for actual knowledge, and if I am to continue this lifestyle it is of the utmost importance that I delve much farther into the matter and become a genuine bearer of knowledge, beyond a list of effects and chemical names. Within the next few months I would be wise to spend my time reading up on McKenna, Leary, Huxley, and Burroughs, to name just a few.

No laziness should be tolerated on my part. This sudden moment of realization relates to one of the more memorable scenes in Waking Life, where the protagonist is asked somewhat of a rhetorical question by one of his dream characters about whether the most common human characteristic is fear or laziness. Though I've managed to repress the former to a certain degree I still find myself overindulgent in the latter in a way that is sickening when looked at from an objective standpoint. I have done virtually nothing during my stay on this planet so far and will likely continue this course of action if I don't perform what Thompson referred to as "an agonizing reappraisal of the situation." Though eradication is by no means necessary, recreation needs to take the back seat in favor of the increase of knowledge, so that I might be able to have actual discussions on specific topics rather than repeating generalities and trying to rationalize an answer due to insufficient understanding of the subject. The road requires that I exert the effort to walk, but at the same time it is expected that a certain gratification will come of it, not unlike a marathon runner getting an endorphin rush as a reward for his or her struggle.

For some reason my drug usage has become a defining characteristic although I never sought for it to become that way. Marijuana smoking has become a completely insignificant function of daily life, and has become that way out of habit rather than anything worthwhile. Due to it being present at all times it only seems natural that I partake in the festivities, and I now feel like I've been undermining it and treating it as more of a cheap thrill than with the respect it deserves. The same can be said of my infrequent use of hallucinogenic drugs. Despite that it's been almost a year since I've done LSD I can still sense that I haven't actually learned anything from any of my experiences with the drug. It has been looked at as simply marijuana with visuals, and although I have been quick to give criticism to those who only take the drug because they think it to be the logical continuation of smoking cannabis, my route hasn't really been any better. I think I finally understand the significance of my bad trip four years ago when I first did it. It was not some insufficient level of experience that caused the lack of control and eventual world-crushing trip that resulted from those two hits, but the lack of respect for the drug. In a way I feel like I respect it more now for a different reason, and understand McKenna's statement that the bad trips are more important than the good ones. Ego death is perhaps the least pleasant event in a person's life, but is vital if any sort of true self-fulfillment is to take place. The same could be said for all the other psychedelics I've done, and it would be wise of me to abstain from DMT until I'm able to place myself in a position where smoking it would be beneficial. In a way, I need to start again from scratch, using the drugs for what they're intended for rather than what I used to think they were intended for.

This laziness expands to just about everything else as well. Tomorrow I will go searching for another job and quit my current one as soon as I land something more desirable. I will work towards transferring to a good college for the sake of self-improvement, and will spend my spare time reading Chomsky and Wolf in an attempt to formulate a more complete world view based on actual events, rather than a vague knowledge that we as a species are moving towards something unpleasant. The general, everyday knowledge is no longer sufficient, and I will cast aside my personal comfort to achieve this new status regardless of whether or not I like it. It is not a choice I can give myself, because if given the choice I will choose wrongly as I have done before. Complete mediocrity is no decent way to live, I figure I might as well force myself to take the alternate route. If I ignore what I can see to be right, I have missed the point of life. If held at gunpoint and asked if they were proud of the way they lived, I have doubts that the marketing executive could honestly say yes, and that specific question posed with the threat of immediate death results in brutal honesty. If I were to continue my way of life as I have done before now I may as well die at this very moment. It is only through aspiration that actual meaning can be found.

Every night vegetables,
Minds numbed by THC.
I've got my pen, C.G. the remote
Laurel and Hardy's the best bet at
Four A.M. On a Friday
No dreads about the working day
Funny thing about weekends
When you're unemployed
They don't quite mean so much,
Except you get to hang out with
All your working friends
Well we got us a spaghetti western on 36
I like spaghetti westerns
I like the way the boots are all reverbed out
Walking across the hardwood floors
In fact, everything's got
That big reverb sound
Well what'll I do now?
Go to sleep?
Pull the pud?
We need new pornos
Guess I'm still writing...

Identity

To say that people are shaped based on past experience is the classic argument of nature versus nurture. It's undeniable that the everyday events to which we are subjected are essential in crafting a complete view of the wold around us, but the major events in a person's life cause a much more drastic shift in perspective. Witnessing the death of a friend or loved one is almost certain to cause a more substantial shift in personal identity than a general dissatisfaction with choice of employment, much the same way as a "best day ever" will work in the opposite way. Extreme negative events will cause someone to lean more to the side of pessimism and self-deprecation, and an extreme positive event will change a person's image towards optimism and self-respect. Personal history serves as the primary factor in one's placement on a spectrum of good-badmannerisms and self image.

A single event has the potential to change a person's outlook on life entirely. In City of God, Knockout Ned is one of the few reasonable people living in Cidade de Deus. He advocates hard work in the hopes of a payoff and shuns the gangster lifestyle that is so prevalent in the city, but is unable to maintain it. When his girlfriend is raped, two of his family members killed by Lil' Ze, and his house destroyed, he abandons his previous mentality entirely and becomes the head of his own revenge gang. He forgets his stance on killing and replaces it with Carrot's exception rule that it's justified to kill someone who is trying to kill you. This leads to killing anyone associated with Ze, hiring children as soldiers, and protecting the local drug trade. Ned's first encounter with Ze was so life-shattering that he was willing to turn the city into a war zone and used any means possible to enact his revenge, until, as Rocket says, "The City of God was divided. You couldn't go from one section to the other, not even to visit a relative. The cops considered anyone living in the slum a hoodlum. People got used to living in Vietnam, and more and more volunteers signed up to die." (City of God, 2002)

Only a severe shock has the power to completely reverse someone's alignment. We allow ourselves to get into a comfort zone with things that are familiar and non-threatening, and an intrusion into that safe spot is rarely met with praise. By believing one thing, a person becomes attached to that belief and is unwilling to accept the opposite side of the argument. "If you believe something, you're automatically precluded from believing in the opposite, which means that a degree of your human freedom has been forfeited in the act of this belief." (McKenna, 1984) By clinging so strongly to one side of an argument, we become conditioned to it, and the other side becomes almost offensive. One person may see war as inhuman and a waste of life, while another will focus on the motive for that war and declare it to be for the greater good. It's a rare occurrence that one side acknowledges the other in any significant way, and after hours of argument both are likely to walk away from a discussion on the subject with the same views they started with and a feeling that they're right. This stubbornness and inability to accept an alternate viewpoint paints the other side as inherently wrong and illogical, and we begin to pride ourselves with an ideal world view where everything goes according to our own plans.

Any deviation from this ideal world view is potential ammo for the other side, and leads to a serious change in self-image if we decide to switch sides. Someone who denied the Holocaust is likely to think less of their reasoning abilities if they decide to give up their conspiracy theory and look at the evidence objectively. Given that they were capable of believing something entirely different not long ago, they write themselves off as being irrational. The choice to decide whether or not something is right or wrong could be looked at as a defense mechanism; a way of avoiding the self-doubt that comes with admitting that your previous stance was incorrect.

Although this system of drastic shifts is a breeding ground for reflective self-doubt, it's still a necessary way of establishing a personal identity. There are many who would espouse the benefits of being open minded, but a subtle suggestion is unlikely to have much impact on the person who is dead-set in their beliefs. It is also a system that's intended to work towards the purpose of self-betterment. Though we seem determined to never admit that we might be wrong about something, we gain nothing by being this way. We may be dead-set in our perception of the world, and that may even be considered to be comfortable, but from an outside perspective it is little more than a desperate effort to be as thick as possible.

This stubborn nature prevents people from accepting the truth in many cases. In John Updike's A&P, Sammy feels justified in quitting his job based on a general feeling of dissatisfaction, but the turning point was seeing Lengel confront the girls in the store for "indecent clothing." The language Updike uses gives the reader the sense that Sammy had grown tired of his job before that point, but the absurdity of the event is what causes him to finally leave. Despite being semi-obligated to maintain the job due to family connections, his manager embarrassing the girls outweighed the potential monetary gain that keeping the job would bring. Looking back at Lengel taking over his post as he walks out, Sammy thinks to himself "His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he'd just had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter." (Updike) He sees Lengel as a future version of himself had he decided to maintain the job, and knows that even though the decision may have been hastily decided and based on something insignificant, it was a necessary turning point and an important step in establishing his own identity as someone who won't tolerate what he considers to be an injustice.

I am no different in how I let my surroundings influence my personality. I used to be more trusting, but having a series of friends either rob or attempt to rob me has made me back away from that stance. In one incident, I had let an acquaintance stay at my house for several weeks since he had been evicted from his own and had nowhere to stay. Upon leaving he decided to take with him my mother's checkbook and attempted to steal $2000 out of her bank account. Another incident resulted in a close friend borrowing a large amount of my possessions and then cutting off contact with me and everyone I know. I could try and look past it and think of it as isolated cases of dealing with bad people, but now there's the bit of doubt in the back of my mind every time someone asks to borrow something. Had these incidents not occurred, I would be free of that doubt.

For the most part, mundane events will not do much to change someone's view of the world around them, nor will they affect personal image in any major way. It's more often the case that they lead up to a major event, at which point a new conclusion is drawn which becomes the new belief. Be it death, thievery, or any other revelation-causing event, it is unlikely that you will carry the same mentality after the incident is over. You will cease to be the same person, and continue to evolve your thoughts as these significant events occur. Even the most fanatical devotee to a particular body of thought can't isolate themselves from this.

Anorexia and War Paint

Relating Sut Jhally's "story" to modern day pop culture proves difficult because the characteristics of hair metal and rap music videos haven't been transferred to the modern day. Whereas in Dreamworlds 2 Jhally displays the blatant objectification of women in 1997, looking at the popular videos today shows something entirely different. (Dreamworlds 2, 1997) Instead of the faceless dancing nymphomaniacs, most of the videos I've recently watched either didn't have any women in them at all or focused on a single woman and the relationship with her boyfriend. Even Mariah Carey's "Touch My Body" was nothing more than a joke about seducing a member of the Geek Squad and seemed to be poking fun at the decade-old methods of making music videos rather than glorifying them. Though music may have promoted a distance in equality between the sexes, the current state of the music scene appears innocent enough on the surface that another culprit seems more likely.

The main problem of looking at MTV as some guiding light of the hip world is that it doesn't seem to be very important anymore. I have no idea what kind of music most people listen to, nor do any of my friends or family. The last encounter with popular music I can recall was having to tolerate people singing that "Chicken Noodle Soup" song for several weeks before moving on to the next trendy thing. I listen to instrumental country guitar from 80 years ago and pretentious prog-rock nonsense and had to look at the MTV website to see what could be considered popular today. Tuning in to the MTV channel showed that they don't actually play music anymore, and were instead airing a show about becoming a Maybelline model. Most movies I've seen don't contribute to the negative image of women, all the books I've read tend to take the opposite route, yet there is still no shortage of high school girls strutting around with the word "Juicy" written in pink on the back of their sweat pants.

I blame the phenomenon on advertising. For years women have been bombarded with messages that the only way to be attractive is to coat themselves in a thin layer of various creams and powders until they have straight blonde hair and emanate an unnatural glow. This will draw attractive men to them like a human bug lamp in much the same way that TAG deodorant spray causes every supermodel in relative close proximity to drop whatever they're doing and dash toward the source of the can. They establish a feeling that if you don't "shine" then there's something wrong that needs to be fixed. For the sake of selling their product, they've managed to take characteristics that are unnatural and make them the standard of beauty, such as abnormally large lips or blue paint underneath the eyes. It's at a point when the modifications aren't even pleasant to look at anymore, yet still retain a kind of warped beauty that only exists when looked at from a cultural perspective.

Despite the music video imagery of 1997 not being carried to the modern day, nonsurgical cosmetic procedures in the United states have risen 754 percent as of 2007. 11.7 million procedures were performed in 2007 at a cost of roughly $13.2 billion. The majority of these were for issues dealing solely with appearance, the top five being breast implants, liposuction, eyelid surgery, tummy tucks and breast reduction.(nlm.nih.gov) This is not to say that there aren't cases when there's a legitimate medical reason for performing these surgeries, but when over 90% of the people who undergo cosmetic surgery are women it's evident that the reason is mainly for the sake of self-image. This is a more alarming trend than the sale of makeup, since these feelings of inadequacy go farther than what's on the outside. These are radical procedures that result in a permanent change of the body or face, brought about by feelings that putting on some mascara or lipstick isn't enough to be beautiful. They need bags of silicone underneath their skin and botulism injected into their face before it's going to be good enough to satisfy the aesthetic needs of the opposite sex.

This could easily be related to the relationships between men and women demonstrated in Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand. In chapter one she says that men always try and have the upper hand while the women seek out approval and support.(Tannen) When looked at in this way the instances of "Juicy" seem more in place, despite showing an utter lack of self respect. The given reason will usually be something relatively innocent-sounding like "I thought it was funny," which may be true in most of the cases but doesn't do much to detract from the message that's being displayed. I've never been able to see what's actually funny about labeling yourself as a prostitute, but then again it might be an acquired taste like fine caviar or certain cheeses. "You have the money, I have the time" is less subtle, but even then I doubt that it's actually a conscious decision to advertise one's self as for sale. Perhaps the given response to someone displaying such a message should be "I have ten bucks, meet me at the dumpster behind Chuck E. Cheese in half an hour" for the sake of making them actually question their choice of clothing, but that wouldn't solve the initial problem and would most likely result in injury.

The only real solution is to stop pummeling every female in the country with messages that nobody will ever love them if they don't slot themselves neatly into the makeup cyborg model that we've somehow managed to accept. A six foot tall Aryan with long, straight hair, whore makeup and breasts so big that they'll later result in severe spinal injury isn't a good model for beauty and should be done away with in favor of something attainable and less freakish. If beauty can actually be looked at objectively and not just as a sum of various cultural standards, then it shouldn't be too hard to make the new model look more human. I commend Dove for trying with their Real Beauty campaign, despite that nobody is paying attention to them. The effort would be much more effective if the more popular companies like Revlon or Maybelline would stop implying that their products are necessary to be attractive, but that doesn't fit into the business model. The people that are responsible for establishing a mutant as the standard for beauty should also be responsible for disposing of it, since it's apparently too much to ask of people to stop paying attention to them and being fine with the way they are.

We're All Going to Die

Be it rock music or video games, parents seem determined to cling to any form of media that has the potential to turn their precious little angels into psychotic killers. By means of broken causal thinking, it becomes easy to scapegoat parts of our society that pose no real threat instead of actually looking at the more obvious causes. Eric Harris and Dylan Kebold happened to play Doom and listen to Marilyn Manson, so those are the things that get blamed for the Columbine Massacre, rather than the incredible ease that teenagers can acquire firearms. This line of thinking doesn't require any sort of insight, so following it is significantly easier than actually looking at the real problems in America. Manson writes songs that appear to advocate violence, so naturally he's to blame for the school shootings that occurred, despite the statistical evidence that the vast majority of people that listen to Manson's music don't feel the immediate need to murder large numbers of people.

This is similar to thinking that since the number of people who drown to death increases along with ice cream sales, ice cream is to blame. It's an example of taking two things that might have some sort of flimsy correlation and turning it into solid causality whether or not it's actually correct to do so. Given that the change in blame for teen violence changes every decade or so, you could logically conclude that it isn't actually a cultural problem, but more of an inherent problem in human nature. Perhaps it's difficult to admit that we're actually flawed enough to kill one another without much reason, so instead we block out the thought and turn to something which doesn't make any sense. The current fad seems to be blaming video games more than rock music, using terms like "murder simulator" to describe games like Grand Theft Auto. This implies that if video games weren't around, there would be no intent to shoot each other and no way of figuring out how to do so.

The main argument says that at the very least, video games influence teenagers to commit crimes because everyone between the ages of 13 and 18 is so delusional that they might wake up one day and forget that they're not playing a first person shooter. With this viewpoint present just about everywhere, it's easy to see why so many people believe it just based on prevalence. However, any actual investigation into the matter will statistically show the exact opposite. (gamingsteve.com) As video game sales increase, total levels of violent crimes drop steadily at about the same rate. If anything, people should be making the argument that video games can be used as a means of decreasing violent crime, not arguing that they provoke it. It's almost as if people are desperately trying to be afraid of children, making claims like "The country's youth is out of control and more dangerous than ever," when all data points the other way. These statements sound like they're based on fact, but are no better than something you would read on the average conspiracy theory website. The only real difference between saying that our children are going to kill us and saying that aliens are going to kill us is that you're less likely to see the latter story on the evening news. This is supposed to make it more credible, but that's not always the case.

One supposed reason for all this unnecessary fear mongering is that if you're able to keep the public in a state of constant panicked frenzy, they'll be more likely to consume. If you tell someone that it's "more likely than you think" that their child is going to shoot them, that somehow it's going to stimulate them to rush out to the store and buy a bunch of items that usually go undefined. I'm left wondering how attempting to destroy the family bond can be economically stimulating. What product is there that's going to help people once they're terrified of their own offspring? Maybe by making the general public afraid of their friends and neighbors there will be a sudden surge in the security industry, but the family model doesn't seem to fit into the equation. Unless the intent is to cause parents to disown their children, there doesn't appear to be any actual reason for painting kids as dangerous and unpredictable by nature.

So perhaps it's a more parental fear rather than saying that the children are the ones to be feared. This is nothing more than the end result of the real dangers of society. These dangers are present just about everywhere: pedophiles, new psychological diseases found in more and more kids, hard drugs, teen suicide, etc. Not only are we afraid that our children are going to be corrupted, but also that they're at constant risk when placed in a situation where they're not closely monitored by their parents. The internet is a useful source of information, but also overrun with child predators who will pose as surfers on MySpace and then lure them into an unmarked van in an undisclosed location. More ADD is diagnosed, so there must be some sort of epidemic. These are fears designed to prey on the occasional parental worries about safety, but blown up to a level where despite being unrealistic, are cause for immediate alarm.

In Barry Glassner's Culture of Fear, he says that these fears are created to obscure the more difficult problems with society. There were statistics are put out by the Times saying that suicide rates in teens tripled between 1952 and 1992, so according to the correlation model of thinking, suicide is the clear problem. The model doesn't allow for the more sensible reasons for this statistic, such as the advent of AIDS, exponential decrease in public education spending, overall increase of the adolescent population, or the increased rates of poverty and divorce.(Glassner, 53) The fear is created, but never examined to determine the real cause. Though teen suicide isn't an insignificant problem, it takes the spotlight rather than the more important and more difficult problems that cause it in the first place.

What usually strikes me first with any of these wide-spread fears is that they tend to be sort of wispy and hard to trace to anyone in particular. They work much the same as the current terrorism scares by relying on an invisible enemy that just happens to be everywhere at once and places us in a constant state of alert. Serial killers are usually described as quiet loners after they're caught, and somehow that equates to justifiable suspicion against all quiet loners. In the case of threats to children, your neighbor or good friend could be a secret pedophile or child rapist and show no signs of it. By making the threat seem real but still keeping it intentionally vague, it manages to heighten the severity of that threat. Since these dangerous people show no signs of danger, you can't go anywhere or interact with anyone without being put at risk.

This is especially clear in the case of adults fearing their children. One definitive characteristic of the generation gap is that older people never understand younger people, so now they have the entire age group of people under eighteen listed as part of the unknown. When you take that basic lack of understanding and apply the current influences like video games and music, the unknown turns to suspicion. Now say that these influences cause the adolescent age group to abandon any form of morality and kill anyone in their line of sight and you have a fear that's solid, but is applied to a group of people that is so expansive that it makes up roughly thirty percent of the population. Saying that people fear the unknown is valid, but when coupled with deliberate misinformation on a wide scale it becomes intensified much more.

What we are left with is a culture so terrified of itself that it runs away from shadows and erupts any time something bad happens. Michael Moore tries to demonstrate in Bowling for Columbine that guns are the real issue behind school shootings rather than trying to further the weak arguments presented by the opposing side, but this goes largely unnoticed. (Moore, 2002) The same stories are still repeated on the news today with the upcoming release of Grand Theft Auto IV, and are likely to continue with every major video game release where you're able to perform acts that would result in jail time if tried in real life. As a society we are so scared of issues that border on insignificant that we don't address and fix the real problems, which only breeds greater frequency of the incidents upon which we do focus.

I Own Five Mansions Because I'm Important

Unless you've somehow managed to become completely cut off from the rest of society, money plays an integral role in daily life. A currency system is convenient because it places a number value on every good or service in the world, which saves us from having to run the economy on a highly complicated bartering system. Without money we wouldn't know how to keep our civilization running, but it has taken a more important role in society beyond simple monetary value. It is a symbol of status, where you can effectively claim that one person is better than another because their net worth is more. The person with the highest number can feel good about themselves and relax, knowing that they have succeeded in life beyond all others. To the others, this will evoke either a feeling of envy, or give a lesser individual a greater sense of self-respect for knowing that they base their significance on something other than a numerical value.

In terms of functionality, money serves its purpose up to a certain point. The average person hopes that they can scrounge up enough funds to live their lives without too much unbearable debt, and with any luck they'll achieve their goal. As class goes up, the required amount of money also goes up to maintain their desired lifestyle. A lower class person can survive with a relatively low annual income, but the richer types need at least a few hundred thousand dollars a year to maintain upkeep. This works well enough up to a certain point. You reach a point where you can't really advance in class, at which point your vast wealth becomes pointless. There's little difference between someone who has half a billion dollars to their name and someone who has ten billion. After a certain point there's nothing left to buy.

Once this point is reached, the super rich tend to start doing things which could be accurately described as "completely idiotic." It becomes a game of one-upping the other super rich people in some desperate attempt to make yourself seem more important even though you're already at the top of the social ladder. A person might use all the excess money to buy expensive cars that they never drive, or buy more mansions that they don't live in. This has no functional use, and the behavior only exists for the sake of being able to own more things than someone else. By owning more things, the billionaire can safely say that they're of greater worth, despite that they have absolutely no use for all the cars they bought, no appreciation of the art they procured, or desire to converse with their trophy wife.

The case of Chris McCandless is a prime example of how money is only useful in the framework of society. (Into the Wild, 2007) Most people seem to classify his thorough abandonment of his previous life as a mistake while ignoring the possibility that he wasn't seeking to return to it. As a society, we place so much value on our money that when he burns his along with all his identification our gut reaction confusion. Chris sought to be entirely dependent on none other than himself with an eventual trip to Alaska, a plan that had no reliance on a number value. The fact that he burned his money even seems to serve as a distraction for people trying to analyze his plans, where they focus on the money more than inherent ideological problems such as boundless arrogance and a tendency to ignore the feelings of his friends in most cases. The same could be said for Sam in Updike's A&P, where a lot of attention was diverted to the observation that quitting his job was an end to his income, rather than looking at why he decided to do so. (Updike)

This isn't to say that money isn't important within the framework of society. Chris had no use for it because he intentionally placed himself in a position where he wouldn't have anything to buy. Unless he decided to use it for bedding, it would serve no functional purpose. To the average person, it's an entirely different story. In society, it becomes the primary focus on most occasions. There is constantly someone who needs to be paid, so it's necessary that Joe Sixpack spend most of his life in a cubicle doing repetitive paperwork so that he can pay his bills. You need food, water, and shelter, and we've advanced to the point where it's become more difficult to find any of these if you don't have a source of income.

This isn't a matter of choice, rather necessity. The need for money is fundamentally matter of basic survival for most people, but the problem arises when it becomes the focus. When the desire for more money becomes a want rather than a need, it can be safely referred to as greed. My opinion of the ideal state of being housed within the framework of society is lucrative self-actualization. In most cases this is not a possibility, but at the same time I think it's at least something to strive for. In the same way that there's some abstract model of perfect beauty floating around in our heads, there should be a perfect method of survival that's unreachable, but should at least be considered. This doesn't allow for the possibility of giving money more significance than base survival. If people are unwilling to take a less tolerable job for the sake of unnecessary financial gain, it's more likely that they'll enjoy life a bit more. In terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the model of "more stuff = more fun" rarely extends beyond the base of the pyramid. (not2.org)

Though this is my model, it's hardly the widespread model. Given that we live in a consumer based society, money is given far more importance than it deserves. It is the primary objective in life, because the more money we have, the more unnecessary crap we can buy. I would argue that the allure of luxury is similar to a Siren Song, but there's no shortage of people that think they would be genuinely happy if they owned a yacht. It's a sort of false happiness that's based entirely on the dollar value of personal property rather than anything even remotely significant. Once you climb up to the top of the social ladder the happiness isn't even remotely derived from the actual objects the own, but the dollar value alone. There's no point owning the newest Ferrari when there's a 65 mile per hour speed limit on the freeway, unless you feel like being an outlaw.

I would instead attempt to derive my happiness from creativity, be it my own or that of others. Such an approach is unlikely to be praised by the money-minded individual, but that's none of my concern. I have the tendency to take my view of money even further beyond the need of necessity, into a kind of objective hatred. While most look at their bank account as a source of survival an possibility, to me it resembles a chain. There's an omnipresent opinion that more money is the equivalent of greater success, but that's strictly limited to a business sense. When asking the same people who value their money above all else who their personal heroes are, they're unlikely to name the owner of their insurance company. Not only is it a source of false happiness, but also a false sense of meaning. All my heroes have done something that I admired, though most of them probably only made enough money doing so to place themselves in lower-middle class at best. To me, Bill Gates is not the model of success by any means. I could be the richest man in the world, but still feel utterly worthless if I achieved the title without actually accomplishing anything. If I were to spend the rest of my life as a stock broker for the sake of income, I would likely spend my death bed weeks thinking that I might as well have died at the start of my career.

Money should be a secondary objective at most. If personal income is enough to guarantee survival, it should be put entirely out of mind and your time would be better spent doing something you enjoy rather than seeking something you don't need. It doesn't breed any true satisfaction, only the delusion that you're existence has been worthwhile. If you're able to do something significant while making money doing so, you're a luckier person than most, but even if that's not the result of your efforts it should at least be the attempt. I will envy the starving artist any day over the billionaire arms dealer.

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WALL OF FUCKING TEXT. You're some kind of strange mutant if you actually read all of this. I still didn't use up the character limit, god damn. I'll add an irrelevant video link at the end, just to fill even more space.

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I should make these longer. I think I'll just post every single essay I've written for my English class this year as my next blog once I finish my final. If I'm lucky, I'll be able to fit them all into one.

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And you didn't.

boss trombone: damn
boss trombone: I just had some weird thoughts
RabidKangaroo15: Those being
boss trombone: Mym ind can't comprhend a god making a god, because it will always go back to nothing there at first, and nothing is something, so who made that? That's nothing newe, but maybe our minds can't comprehend that, but when you die in an after like state
boss trombone: your mind can comprehend it
RabidKangaroo15: Spherical time pretty much solves that when applied to contemporary physics
RabidKangaroo15: Problem is, everyone thinks that time is just time
RabidKangaroo15: It moves forward, and it's necessary that there be a beginning and perhaps an end
RabidKangaroo15: String theory goes against this, and says that the fundamental particles of the universe operate in something like 46 different dimensions
RabidKangaroo15: We can comprehend 4
RabidKangaroo15: Spacial, and one dimensional time
RabidKangaroo15: When you expand time to another dimension, it's no longer necessary that there be a beginning since it ceases to be a line
RabidKangaroo15: So now you can somewhat grasp the idea of a 5th dimension
RabidKangaroo15: And maybe you can expand that into 3D time if you try hard enough
RabidKangaroo15: But then you're still left with 40 dimensions
RabidKangaroo15: And damned if anyone knows what to make of that
RabidKangaroo15: Point being
RabidKangaroo15: The whole "God must have created everything" is assumption bullshit
RabidKangaroo15: We have an incredibly narrow view of the universe given the actual complexity of it
RabidKangaroo15: And trying to explain things in our observational framework doesn't take us very far
RabidKangaroo15: So we come up with this "God did it" bullshit as an attempt at explaining it
RabidKangaroo15: Religion is basically just a placeholder for the unknown until we figure it out
RabidKangaroo15: Much the same way ancient Egyptians didn't know what the sun was, so they explained it by saying it was the Sun god riding across the sky in his chariot
RabidKangaroo15: Nobody would believe that now unless they were completely delusional
RabidKangaroo15: Plus, the big bang is as far back as we can look
RabidKangaroo15: That doesn't mean that it's necessarily the beginning
RabidKangaroo15: There's models of the universe with several big bangs all over the place
boss trombone: okay this is seriously freaking me out
boss trombone: i liked it better being ignorant
RabidKangaroo15: and there's still plenty of possibility that the big bang is a cyclical process
RabidKangaroo15: Ignorance is boring
RabidKangaroo15: Go see Ben Stein's new movie if you want to be an idiot
boss trombone: I don't think that's possible to figure out
boss trombone: Your brain can't
RabidKangaroo15: Of course it can't figure it out
RabidKangaroo15: If string theory is right, the true nature of the universe is way, WAY beyond human comprehension
RabidKangaroo15: But that doesn't stop God from being a lame crutch for people who like to pretend they have everything figured out because they know nobody else can explain it either
boss trombone: Yes but it makes seem living every day life pointless if it all ends without sometihng coming
RabidKangaroo15: Bleh
RabidKangaroo15: All this "life is pointless" stuff is all based on the idea that there needs to be some grand significance to it
RabidKangaroo15: Which usually goes undefined by anyone making the statement
RabidKangaroo15: Take this example
RabidKangaroo15: Before people get into the habit of the baselss argument that life lacks purpose, what keeps them going?
RabidKangaroo15: That's an easier answer to find than what you're looking for
boss trombone: They want an answer
RabidKangaroo15: Then define it yourself
RabidKangaroo15: Thing is
RabidKangaroo15: If you're looking for the GRAND ANSWER to everything
RabidKangaroo15: Why you're here, what you're supposed to be doing, etc
RabidKangaroo15: Where you came from
RabidKangaroo15: Where you're going
RabidKangaroo15: That's all opinion
RabidKangaroo15: There's nothing out there that's going to give you an answer
RabidKangaroo15: or any sort of definitive evidence to base your life off of
RabidKangaroo15: And people tend to look at this emptiness as evidence that life doesn't matter
RabidKangaroo15: like if God isn't really there and doesn't love you then there's no point in going on
RabidKangaroo15: I disagree, heartily
RabidKangaroo15: There is no shortage of meaning in life
RabidKangaroo15: You just need to know where to looke
RabidKangaroo15: Maybe if you end up as a wage slave working in a cubicle and going home every day to watch Lil' Bush the argument holds water
RabidKangaroo15: Genuine entertainment and sense of purpose changes the formula
RabidKangaroo15: Which is why I'll gladly die before I become a fucking insurance salesman or any such bullshit
boss trombone: ok I keep re reading what you said and
boss trombone: I have no idea
boss trombone: I'm looking
boss trombone: for happyness
boss trombone: right now
boss trombone: to make life seem unpointless
boss trombone: And
boss trombone: You said you need to define it your self
RabidKangaroo15: Yep
boss trombone: and I don't know where I'm going with this
boss trombone: christ I'm a wreck on just weed
boss trombone: shrooms must make you insane
RabidKangaroo15: Maybe if you think you're going to go insane
RabidKangaroo15: The way I look at it is
RabidKangaroo15: There are things in life that are significant and things that aren't
RabidKangaroo15: When you do any strong psychedelic and put yourself in a state of mind where you can effectively question the world around you, it becomes more apparent which things go where
RabidKangaroo15: You go to your job because you have to, not because it gives your life meaning
RabidKangaroo15: The American Dream in its current state is bullshit, but there are people that actually think they'll be able to give their lives meaning by getting a six figure office job, a two-story house in upper-middle class white suburbia, and a wife and 2.4 children
RabidKangaroo15: Doing so is subscribing to a wide-spread view of what's supposed to make you happy
RabidKangaroo15: They ignore the real solutions to their problems in favor of something that probably won't work in the long run
boss trombone: exactly
boss trombone: so what makes stuff have a point now
RabidKangaroo15: Hell, the divorce rate is still something like 40% in this country, since so many people are desperate to fit into this model and never take the time to question it
boss trombone: how am I ever going to enjoy a game or south park or some shit
boss trombone: if there;s nio grand scheme to it now
boss trombone: living in the moment
RabidKangaroo15: My view of what makes life have point
RabidKangaroo15: Is to systematically deconstruct all of this stuff
RabidKangaroo15: Look at it objectively
RabidKangaroo15: Take the things in life that don't make you happy and ask why that is
RabidKangaroo15: If you don't like your job, what can you do that you would like?
RabidKangaroo15: I recall a Terrence McKenna session when he was saying that culture is not your friend, and I completely agree
RabidKangaroo15: The ideal state is completely self-created, not following any sort of social norm
RabidKangaroo15: Every person is different, so happiness is a completely personal problem
RabidKangaroo15: For me, the goal is survival by means of writing, with occasional drug use for the purpose of self-improvement
RabidKangaroo15: That's my model, but I wouldn't apply it to anyone else
RabidKangaroo15: It's not easy to find what makes life significant
RabidKangaroo15: Maybe people cling to the predetermined routes just because it's already laid out for you and thus easier than figuring out the real one.
RabidKangaroo15: And maybe it will work out for a few people
RabidKangaroo15: But there will always be problems with that line of thinking that won't be solved until they figure out for themselves why they're still not really happy or fulfilled after doing what they were supposed to
RabidKangaroo15: I know my route
RabidKangaroo15: It's not based on anything predetermined, and is in blatant defiance of any sort of legal framework
RabidKangaroo15: But I figure I've fucked up if I deviate from that path
RabidKangaroo15: And sacrificing it just because I'm afraid of improsonment is worse than the punishment for conformity
RabidKangaroo15: But as for you
RabidKangaroo15: You have to figure it out for yourself
RabidKangaroo15: Mushrooms are just my suggestion because they tend to help me out, they might not work in your case
boss trombone: But doesn't your mind always come back to this now?
boss trombone: How will you enjoy anything?
RabidKangaroo15: Well enjoy is kind of a hard thing to define
RabidKangaroo15: I think the concept of "purpose" is kind of ethereal
RabidKangaroo15: It defies any sort of rational explanation, since you could always argue that it won't matter in the end
RabidKangaroo15: Any book I write will eventually be destroyed and no trace will remain
RabidKangaroo15: But by then I'll be gone, and I'll have known that I achieved the thing that at the moment makes me enjoy life
boss trombone: But how do you just accept that?
RabidKangaroo15: I guess you could make a process of elimination argument
RabidKangaroo15: I've never really understood the "everything is pointless" argument being taken seriously
RabidKangaroo15: It seems like grasping at straws for the purpose of desperately trying to be insignificant
RabidKangaroo15: You look forward 1000 years and say that you'll be forgotten, but that completely negates the present based on something that has no significance to YOU
RabidKangaroo15: So what if nobody will know who you were in 1000 years
RabidKangaroo15: Is life just some stupid game where you lose if you don't impress a bunch of people you don't care about in the future?
RabidKangaroo15: I'd place that worldview at about the same level as evangelical Christianity
RabidKangaroo15: Since you exist NOW, the only point you can have is now
RabidKangaroo15: Maybe if you become a famous writer or artist people in the future will love you forever, but even then that doesn't matter worth a damn
RabidKangaroo15: So you find what you enjoy in the current day and stick to it
RabidKangaroo15: If you eliminate the need for distant future acceptance, you see that importance has to lie in the modern day
boss trombone: So why do you go to newgrounds? Why do you play tf2? You like doing these things, but why? To impress other people with your score and level? To gain more knowedge to share with others thus inflating your ego? Only learning to buukd your self for something you don't know coming?
boss trombone: I really can't grasp this
boss trombone: shouldn't have smoked
boss trombone: build
boss trombone: ahhh
RabidKangaroo15: Newground and TF2 are trivial placeholders when nothing of significance is available
RabidKangaroo15: One of the things I consider significant is human interaction
RabidKangaroo15: I have no justification for this, I just accept it
RabidKangaroo15: But that's on a basic human level
boss trombone: how do you enjoy these things when you know they are trivial and pointless?
RabidKangaroo15: Well think of it this way
RabidKangaroo15: We're genetically programmed to act in certain basic ways for the sake of survival
RabidKangaroo15: But these I think are the most trivial things of all
RabidKangaroo15: Good food, mating, none of that has any real importance
RabidKangaroo15: But when you take something like that and move past it while still working within the framework, you open up new possibilities
RabidKangaroo15: We may have developed communication for the sake of hunting or whatever, but we've pushed it much, much farther
RabidKangaroo15: To the point where we can even accurately express things that are complete abstractions by using language
RabidKangaroo15: A scene in Waking Life uses the example of "love"
RabidKangaroo15: You can't find love anywhere, but you understand it
RabidKangaroo15: We've pushed a basic function farther than it was originally designed for
RabidKangaroo15: Most of the things I really consider important fall into the category of "art" one way or another
RabidKangaroo15: So while I may spend my spare time doing trivial things such as posting witty one-liners on Newgrounds, I'm listening to music while I do so
RabidKangaroo15: The process of creation is an amazing thing, and goes against any sort of evolutionary necessity
RabidKangaroo15: There's no reason we need to make music, or paint
RabidKangaroo15: The real artists do so because of a need that goes farther than simple survival
RabidKangaroo15: Doing so gives them a deep, almost mystical sense of fulfillment that defies human nature itself
RabidKangaroo15: Writing is my art, so I pursue it
RabidKangaroo15: Primitive life is largely insignificant
RabidKangaroo15: Working for the sake of survival is no better than any other animal, we've recieved greater intelligence for the sake of doing a better job at it, but the only real point to it I think is to take those new abilities and use them in creative ways
RabidKangaroo15: Otherwise your life has no more content than the average moth or plantlife
boss trombone: I've never felt anything that doesn't like to somehow link to building your ego and self or impressing and sharing with another
boss trombone: link
RabidKangaroo15: Ego is pointless and misguided
RabidKangaroo15: I think my favorite Terrence McKenna quote was where he said that the main purpose of hallucinogens is to take everything you thought you knew and throw it out the window
boss trombone: I feel like now that I'm in
boss trombone: There's no going back
RabidKangaroo15: in what
boss trombone: this mind set
boss trombone: this must be why drugs are illegal
RabidKangaroo15: So people don't get all depressed?
RabidKangaroo15: nah
RabidKangaroo15: There's no decent reason why psychedelic drugs are illegal
boss trombone: Yes, if everyone took the time to think about this and came to conclusions like society would be completely different. Half of my comedy comes from the ignorance of others... spoofs point out faults, I laugh at idiots on NG.. which makes me happier but why?
RabidKangaroo15: Because you have too much ego
RabidKangaroo15: Do some mushrooms and kill it
boss trombone: you need ego to survive
RabidKangaroo15: nah
boss trombone: with out building your self yp for something in the long run
boss trombone: you hwad back to poinless existance
boss trombone: head
RabidKangaroo15: There's a big difference between doing something you enjoy and thinking you're superior because you've done so
RabidKangaroo15: ego is just a vestigial human component left over from when there needed to be alpha-males
boss trombone: Okay, I enjoythe south park parodies when they spoof people. Sometimes I feel the people they spoof are pretty dumb or evil or whatever, so that's what makes it funny?
boss trombone: How is this ego?
boss trombone: everyone has thoughts like this
RabidKangaroo15: Because they are dumb or evil
RabidKangaroo15: ego relates more to feeling like you're awesome just for the sake of feeling like you're awesome
RabidKangaroo15: Of course you're never going to share a connection with some fuck like Dick Cheney
RabidKangaroo15: Or the ICP fan who constantly talks about how totally high he got on 4/20
boss trombone: See
boss trombone: you know you're superior
boss trombone: to him
boss trombone: you must have some
boss trombone: ego
RabidKangaroo15: Of course I have some ego
RabidKangaroo15: It's programmed in
RabidKangaroo15: But I try to keep it in check
RabidKangaroo15: The whole power struggle thing is a fundamental flaw in humanity and I address it as such
RabidKangaroo15: But I don't think there's enough acid in the entire world to stop me from thinking that cellardoor6 would be better off used as a source of fuel
boss trombone: See
boss trombone: I enjoy ripping on people like this
boss trombone: it's entertaining
RabidKangaroo15: Then be entertained by it
RabidKangaroo15: Who cares
boss trombone: I do
RabidKangaroo15: Why
boss trombone: why am I
boss trombone: Like
RabidKangaroo15: More like what's so inherently wrong with that
boss trombone: If I wrote a poem I really enjoyed
boss trombone: I want to share it with people
boss trombone: \I want them to like my art
boss trombone: how si this wrong
boss trombone: is
RabidKangaroo15: It's not
RabidKangaroo15: Art is intended to be appreciated
RabidKangaroo15: The real problem is say
RabidKangaroo15: You want people to acknowledge how awesome you are for having killed 20 people in the war
RabidKangaroo15: Anyone can see the spectrum of good-bad
RabidKangaroo15: And there are plenty of people out there that are just completely fucking irredeemable
RabidKangaroo15: So you make jokes at the things that are wrong
RabidKangaroo15: And you laugh because you can see how completely backwards certain things are
boss trombone: I just want to be happy, like.. I want to go into the woods and just enjoy life with my friend on 420
boss trombone: but now
boss trombone: I have this tohught in theb ack of my head
boss trombone: of why do I want to ne happy?
boss trombone: what's the point?
boss trombone: Now I can't shake that
RabidKangaroo15: Well, enjoy your depression then if you're set on it
RabidKangaroo15: Asking the point of being happy and then choosing to be miserable over the question makes less sense
boss trombone: I guess
RabidKangaroo15: I'm going to smoke a metric fuckton of weed and start a band with my pals on 4/20
RabidKangaroo15: it's going to be doubleswell
boss trombone: you should write a book with subjects like this
boss trombone: to get people thinking
RabidKangaroo15: I'll just copy/paste this into a blog post where nobody will read it
boss trombone: >
boss trombone: You know what I mean
boss trombone: or not
RabidKangaroo15: I do
RabidKangaroo15: But I already made it a blog
RabidKangaroo15: So whatever
boss trombone: Then how about smash bros eh? I enjoy beating others, it makes me feel good that I increased my skill thus building the ego FURTHER
boss trombone: Why do you play smash bors if you have no ego
boss trombone: this all leads back to this
RabidKangaroo15: Because Brawl is super fun at a party
RabidKangaroo15: and is SPORTING COMPETITIVENESS
boss trombone: But beating people with 1 vs 1 no items etc
boss trombone: can be fun too
RabidKangaroo15: Exactly
boss trombone: And the fun comes from winning?
boss trombone: You beat another person?
RabidKangaroo15: Hells yes
RabidKangaroo15: Problem is, you're reading far, far too much into that
RabidKangaroo15: It's supposed to be competitive
RabidKangaroo15: So you all sit around, blaze some, then play it
RabidKangaroo15: all in good fun
boss trombone: Hmmm
boss trombone: In gunbound it's pretty much just play to impress the other player after you've got bored of the basic set up
boss trombone: but then there's things like tower defense games
boss trombone: whree I can play alone
boss trombone: and have fun
RabidKangaroo15: Read some Terrence McKenna
RabidKangaroo15: Just
RabidKangaroo15: do it
boss trombone: I don't even know who that is
RabidKangaroo15: I suggest finding out
RabidKangaroo15: http://rabid-echidna.newgrounds.com/ne ws/post/109866
RabidKangaroo15: Watch the video
boss trombone: okay
boss trombone: see
boss trombone: I see my comments in your blog and I feel shy that others will see my thoughts and also happy that others will see things I have learned
boss trombone: everything leads back to ego with happyness...
boss trombone: happiness
boss trombone: meh
RabidKangaroo15: Well the thing is
RabidKangaroo15: Ego tends to run rampant when you don't keep it in check
RabidKangaroo15: And everything becomes 1-upmanship
RabidKangaroo15: And you connect that to self-satisfaction and enjoyment and can't see the more important sources of enjoyment beneath it
RabidKangaroo15: Take Brawl as an example
RabidKangaroo15: There's some fun to be had in beating someone else in the game, but keep in mind that Brawl itself is a largely insignificant thing
RabidKangaroo15: Winning that game doesn't rise to the level of, say, having a conversation such as this with that person
boss trombone: So having some type of ego is important to enjoy living in the present because you don't know exactly what the big picture is?
boss trombone: Is there anyway to summarize everything in a few lines?
RabidKangaroo15: I'll go with
RabidKangaroo15: "Ego is fleeting and illusory pleasure used to divert attention away what really matters."

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Edit: Great success.

Cat depression.

A heart breaking condition that effects my cat right now. Symptoms consist mainly of sitting in one place for hours on end looking miserable and growling slightly at anyone who approaches. Fair enough; I wouldn't want this done to me either. Maybe if you didn't get in fights with the locals, we wouldn't have to have the vet cut a big hole in your side and give you a plastic collar to stop you from licking it while all the grossness drains out.

Super awesome high speed internet that disconnects and boots you from the game every five minutes.